


Tourmaline

by Kastaka



Category: Maelstrom LARP
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-01
Updated: 2017-05-01
Packaged: 2018-10-26 05:33:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 23
Words: 9,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10780596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kastaka/pseuds/Kastaka
Summary: Compilation of Tourmaline fic from lrpdrabbles LJ





	1. Tourmaline's Evening

Tourmaline sat in a small clearing and dreamed of crystal.

It was strange how it seemed no harder, out here in the hills, than it had back at home, sitting beneath his previous work. The trees didn't rise up invitingly with his thoughts, but neither was he distracted by the play of light through mana. The swirling rhythms of creation were muted here, distant. Enough to breathe, but not enough to drown in.

Sometimes he sculpted his own body to test out an idea, but it was hardly necessary. The thoughts would come together, or they would not, and it would be obvious when they did, experiments or no. He toyed with the idea of keeping some of his architectural improvements, but in the end he reverted to the form in which he had first met the Marshalls. No need to make things complicated. The benefits of recognition still outweighed the benefits of change.

It was amazing how little his new understanding of the world had changed him. He'd have to pass it on, of course, to those who could make better use of it, but the next couple of years of his life still stretched before him in well-planned harmony, rather the same as they had been last season. Even if his initial theories had been correct, rather than the rather naively hopeful views his fellow crystalline entities appeared to hold, at least he would leave a fitting legacy.

A trail of incomprehensible crystalline monuments sounded exactly like the kind of mark his Lady would like him to leave on Her world.


	2. Awakening

Under the leaves, something stirred.

For an age of the world, it had sat here, inert, unmoving. Gradually it had begun to sense again - first the comforting warmth of the energies that had formed it, then back along the lines they traced out through the surrounding areas, out and up - although it wasn't quite up as he later came to understand it.

The physical world had gradually faded in around it. The feeling of the ground - of being supported - the difference between earth and sky, up and down. From time to time, a disturbance. A tiny weight atop it, an insect, or once or twice a heavier foot, some kind of animal. The currents of the air swirling past, as complex in their own way as the currents of mana that had already become familiar.

Now it was no longer content just to feel. The world seemed to have settled into as sharp a focus as it was going to, without some kind of further interaction. It recalled the many appendages that had crossed it, felt the limits of its current form - and grew.

The crystal, still blind, lifted itself on myriad tiny crystalline legs and felt the world move dizzyingly around it. Still disorientated, it continued to move - lifting and dropping the new appendages, at first all over the place but gradually learning which way each movement propelled it, the rhythm of walking.

As it stumbled across the leaf litter covering the disused mana site, it felt something else, dimly, the glimmering of a new sense. Something was hitting its surface - not like the air, not like the vibrations of the crunching leaves, not like a creature, not like the flows of magic. It paused in its exploration of movement as it examined this new phenomenon.

It took some time to correlate the strange pulses, so very fast, to build them into a coherant picture like its other senses could create. By shuffling from side to side, it established that this was also a view of the physical world, but at much longer range than its previous senses.

Having learnt to see, the young facet stumbled on into the world.


	3. To Be Free

He had been so busy, at the festival, running this way and that. Busy, but for little reward. People were getting wiser. His own people were keeping something from him. Most of his news had already been delivered. He had avoided paying the price for his actions, but only by handing it off to those who could afford less to pay it.

He had been so busy that one piece of news has passed him by, although he had received it and passed it on. It gradually percolated into his consciousness on the way home. 

_Mouse is dead._

He couldn't really say that he knew Mouse. He'd done his best Inanimate Object impression for her; he'd listened to one of her secret meetings, which he'd thought his trade house would be more interested in, but they weren't; she'd complimented his appearance. Earlier that day, she had given him an excuse to eavesdrop on some Fallen when pretending to admire her purple glaive. But there had been something about her, something that meant that without her the world seemed a greyer and less meaningful place.

For a moment, he wished he had chosen a different path, that he had raised armies, that he could march an implacable crystalline horde on the camps of the Bakhana and the Mayans, and not stop until each and every one of them was dead. That he could take the direct path. That he could crush the children of Basilisk with military might.

Then he examined the vision in more detail, and part of him recoiled in horror from it. Leading armies? Raising children, just for this selfish aim? Marching at the head of a legion of fanatically loyal soldiers, taking most of them to their unquestioning demise? It was not in him to do such things - or rather, it was, and the thought that it was haunted his every action. The vision of the march against those of the Basilisk was too close to the flashbacks of the joyful, purposeful, empty young soldiers, marching shoulder to shoulder with their gleaming crystalline brethren into the battle-lines, cleaved apart by wasps on the order of the Illini.

He was happy to use other people's resources, certainly, to enable other people to march their armies to battle, but he would not lead his own soldiers, he would not bring his own children into such a world as this. He could not face the prospect of looking into blank, trusting eyes and giving any order, even one which would command the young creature to be free.


	4. Day and Night

In time, it learned other things about the world.

It wanted to be taller, to see more at once, so it built and built, up and up. There was much more to take in, up at this height, with all that extra surface returning impressions of the world. So much more, in fact, that it didn't notice the impending wildlife until it suddenly fell, its support structure shattering underfoot.

Next time it built something a little sturdier.

It is hard to remember how much time it spent wandering the forest. It took some time for it to recognise the cycle of day and night, and it paid little attention to them - it could get a better picture of the world when the light was good, but that was all. It found that the more complicated its form, the more it needed to stop a while every now and again for repairs. It experimented with the forms of moving things that it found in the forest. It was almost eaten by a stand of bushes swaying with apparent guilelessness - and then, when it approached, with deadly precision.

And then one day it found itself pinned to the ground by an arrow, feeling the cracks beginning to spread through its form. It concentrated, smoothed them out, and hunted through its memories for the projectile's source, staying completely still in the meantime - a predator often lost interest in, or maybe couldn't see, something that wasn't moving.

Over there, a movement in the bushes.

The projectile was not a thing it had previously encountered. Though there was danger here, there was also opportunity. Shedding some of the damaged form, it began to crawl towards the disturbance.


	5. Feathered Whisper

Shedding as fast as it could, the purple crystalline lizard stalked the hunter through the trees, leaving a trail of fragments gently dissolving behind it.

It still had no measure of time, so it could not tell how many hours it sprinted, paused as the hunter did, inched closer, and then sprinted once more when the hunter moved on again. Once or twice it lost track of the movement, and it was not at all sure that the hunter it ended up following was the hunter that had first shot at it.

In the end it was not small enough or fast enough - although, as it happened, to its advantage. The hunter stuck a scaled foot down, and it was trapped. The hunter picked up the limp crystalline thing (for playing dead often saved it some unpleasantness, as it was rather an unpalatable snack), shook it a couple of times, and dropped it in a pouch.

\---

Feathered Whisper knew that something had been out there, but when she finally decided that it was safe to leave the undergrowth, there wasn't much left in the area - some jagged crystal substance, like the gems which had fallen like dew one morning and kept falling, the trail leading into the very bushes she had been hiding in, but then out again, as if the thing had stumbled back to complete its death throes. She retrieved her arrow from where it had stuck in the ground, amongst a major scattering of fragments, and put a couple of the larger ones in a pouch for further inspection.

 _Like the shards of basilisk's eye_ , she thought, dimly remembering one of the stories of her tribe. It was an old story, an ancient story, and one where she feared much had been lost in the retelling.

There was precious little game in the forest - she pegged a couple of birds and strung them up on the carrying-harness she wore - but thankfully there was also no sign of the Myrmidons that had been reported out that way. There were no established hives within a day's hard travel, so far as her tribe knew, and she hoped that the hunter who reported the drones out hunting had just been jumping at shadows.

Motion caught her eye a couple of times, but there were plenty of small scuttling things in the undergrowth here, none of which was any particular threat. If she hadn't found the game birds then she'd have come home with a couple of cloth slings full of lizards. The tribe wouldn't starve here, even if there were Myrmidons hunting the big game.

She was halfway home when she saw it again. **That** was no ordinary lizard. It caught the fading rays of the evening sun like the shards in her pouch. But she'd lost sight of it by the time she finished these thoughts - no doubt it had burrowed under the leaf litter.

So it wasn't quite dead. Or it had offspring. Maybe they could smell the shards in her bag - they hadn't seemed to have a scent, but she knew well that animals had senses that even the Onontakha couldn't match.

She opened the pouch, to see if she could lure it out of hiding, but the crystal shards were gone.

In momentary confusion, she wondered if they could have fallen out somewhere, but the pouch had been properly sealed, at least well enough to keep fragments of that size. Could something have stolen them while she wasn't paying attention? Surely she couldn't have been that unobservant. Maybe they had just disappeared, in the same mysterious manner as their cousins, the dew-gems, appeared.

She walked on, but now she was more alert, especially to the ground. When it made another break into the open to keep up with her, she was ready for it. She was going for her knife as she lashed out with her foot, but simply pinning it to the ground seemed to knock the fight out of it. Carefully, she picked it up between thumb and forefinger, and studied the limp form in the light. It was very like a lizard, except it was all of that one colour that the earlier fragments had been, and it had a strange crest upon its forehead, blue and swirling, which reminded her very strongly of one of those dew-gems.

She shook it a few times to see if it would react, but she needed to get back for the evening meal, and so when it stubbornly remained limp - maybe she had actually killed it - she dropped it in a pouch and tried to forget about it.


	6. A Fluttering And Changing Light

Darkness. Movement. It concentrated on the vibrations, but everything was strangely muffled, and as soon as information was assembled it was obsolete.

Then, suddenly, light once more - a fluttering and changing light, with direction and with wildly varying intensity. It was hard to separate the moving from the creatures holding him, passing him from creature to creature, and the moving that the light did of its own accord, a day's worth of movement in light and shade every moment. What were the creatures doing? What were their intentions? It wasn't any of the normal patterns - they weren't trying to eat, or bury, or transport the facet to their young in case they found it more palatable. Just passing it, round and round, as they stood in a ring around the burning light.

_Fire._

They were standing in a ring. Beneath them the city was burning.

Any one of them was more than a match for any stragglers. The cityfolk were cunning, but even they would run out of arrows, with the whole city aflame. So they stood, a garrison around the city limits, waiting for the dwellers within to make their move, or for the flames to die and the embers to fade.

Later they would close the ring, step by step, the spare ranks swarming into every burrow and cellar that could hide a roasted snake, maybe not quite dead.

But for now, they waited.

_Onontakha._

As the facet recovered from the memory which had overtaken it, the name of the creatures came to it. They were not quite like animals. Maybe it had just picked up these things from their conversation. The daydream was fading now.

"Should we kill it?"

"I'll take it."

The facet was deposited in the lap of an ophidian bedecked in pouches, bearing a staff topped with glossy black feathers. The ophidian stared intently at the facet, who shook off its previous limpness to stand back up on its four legs and look intently right back at him, although the effect was spoilt by its lack of visible eyes, almost its entire head being occupied by its soul-gem.

Frantically, the facet built, as the ophidian gazed on in wonder. It was a more complicated and ambitious project than ever before, but it needed doing, now it was amongst beings that spoke.

Cannibalising most of the lizard body, making it practically helpless, as the ophidians cooked their evening meal and began to eat, the facet formed an experimental vibration chamber, and made a variety of strange tinkling noises as various of its creations broke in an amplified fashion. Finally, it started to produce pure tones, and as the evening wore on, it began to learn how to arrange them.

The fascinated ophidian whose lap the facet was occupying did not interrupt it, despite all of their companions losing interest and retiring for the night, and two changes of fire-feeder, and dawn beginning to break through the night sky, before the facet managed its first word:

"Onontakha?"

_I hunted your people once, with fire and the sword, my kin beside me. But here I am weak, and I cannot remember the cause for which I fought._


	7. Plenty Of Time Yet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This being an actual dream that I actually had, it wanders well outside the bounds of canon. I have made this *slightly* more coherant/consistant than the dream (on account of reaching bits of it that made *no sense*).

He was walking through the marketplace again when Tami ran up, like she'd been looking for him for hours. (He didn't know her name, but he recognised her as someone who'd attended a Weaver supplication and as one of the Wayward Scholars.)

"Gin wants to see you."

That was quite enough of a message to get his attention, as nothing urgent was happening in the vicinity; the swarm of creatures talking and drinking were an anonymous buzz in the background, going about all manner of uninteresting or difficult-to-overhear business. He followed Tami through the crowd, not at a run but certainly at a faster stride than the ambling nobility they passed.

The Mill'en encampment was strangely quiet when they approached. There was movement within the tents - all the usual suspects, fine clothes and earnest conversation - but outside there was just Gin, and the myrmidons she kept company with. Gin was speaking to one of them as Tami and Tourmaline approached, but broke off the conversation well in advance of their arrival, instead smiling at Tourmaline, glad to see him.

Tourmaline looked curiously at her, turning his head slightly to one side and blinking. This was all he had time for before something hit him very hard in the back and he went sprawling to the ground.

"Sorry about this," mutters Gin as she lowered Tourmaline to the ground. It was broad daylight in the middle of the Mill'en encampment, but the noblility and hangers-on in their tents weren't looking out, and there was an almost suspicious dearth of passers-by. Tourmaline went limp and kept silent, feeling the vibrations spreading through his form, unsure of whether he should extend his power to stop them or not. He saw no reason for the Scholars or Raid Hive to kill him, and hoped that by co-operating he would find out more than if he made a fuss or attempted to flee.

The myrmidon who Gin had been conversing with pulled out a variety of tools, which had something in common with the surgeon's tools that Fiona carried with her. It looked speculatively at Tourmaline, but Gin shook her head. She appeared to be counting. Plenty of time yet, thought Tourmaline, taking up a count of his own, but entirely within his mind.

As the seconds ticked by, forming into minutes, the myrmidon became increasingly agitated; Tourmaline just lay there, looking at the sky. "Not yet," hissed Gin, interposing herself between Tourmaline and the myrmidon, the rest of Raid Hive's envoys arrayed behind it. The myrmidon's antennae twitched, and its mouthparts moved - no noise emerged, but it was obvious that it was putting forwards some kind of nonverbal argument. Gin shook her head, putting her good forearm against the creature's chest between its shoulders, not quite physically holding it back, but readying herself to do so.

Another minute, thought Tourmaline, and counted carefully as he felt the shuddering spread through his form, the cracks beginning to form internally.

"Now!" said Gin and stepped aside. The myrmidon fell upon Tourmaline with the strange instruments, tapping here and chipping there, and to his great surprise Tourmaline felt the vibrations challenged by the new impulses that the myrmidon was introducing, felt the energies which had begun to form with the original blow dying down and dissipating. He reached the point of no return in the internal count that he was keeping, but he didn't feel that any action was needed on his part. The repair was being effected for him.

A handful of seconds later, the myrmidon had finished. It rocked back on its hindlegs, breathing hard. Tourmaline wriggled and stretched, testing the repairs, and then he accepted Tami's offer of a hand up.

"And faster than on a human, too," said Gin, somewhat uncertainly. "Well done, Xythoctol." There was something in those words that made Tourmaline remember another incident, with a cup of water, and suddenly the facet had spun around and was holding one of his daggers to her throat. Not that he could do anything lasting with it, not in the time the hive would take to react, but the symbolism was there, at least.

"So what are you going to give in return?" he asked. "Who taught Xythoctol that? Are you going to teach me?"

Gin tensed a little, but remained remarkably calm, and her good hand fluttered a signal that kept the hive at bay. "I'm sure we can arrange something," she said. Tourmaline stood down, both daggers out but at his side. 

"Teaching for one, that I will bring to you," he said. "And equipment, or how to make it if that isn't so rare."

Gin nodded, and then she tapped Xythoctol on the shoulder, and they retreated into the Wayward Scholars' tent, the hive falling in behind them.

Tourmaline turned to Tami, who was still standing there, somewhat shell-shocked.

"Thank you," he said.

Then he spotted Auriel marching between tents off in the distance, and strode off to intercept him, not looking back.


	8. Discovery

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In answer to 'parents' challenge - a few drabbles about Tourmaline's 'discoverers' / parent-figures.

The first time Tourmaline was discovered, he was a lizard, in a world which had not seen his like for some thousand years. Fresh in his senses, he was less than a child, and they gave him in the end to Serpent, who promptly gave him back.

The second time Tourmaline was discovered, he was Onontakha, the priest who wouldn't die, sturdy enough for the mines and a puzzle for the scholars. As a slave, he was not allowed to speak to the Basilisk, but he taught those who did, and in return they let him escape when all was lost.

The third time Tourmaline was discovered, he chose his target carefully, and his form with greater care still. Evocative of those held in respect, but artless enough to promote underestimation. He looked at her with blank eyes, but kept his name.


	9. A Strange Ceremony

The creature grew strong amongst the Tribe of the Mourning Bird, taking their form and running with their children. It mimicked the colouring of several in turn - earning it the name Tourmaline from the sage that had rescued it that first night - but finally reverted to its original colouration as it became more confident in its own identity. It ate, but only when the tribe was well-provisioned. It was a tolerable spotter for the hunt, but not as fast or agile as the other children, nor as skilled with the bow or spear. At first it broke itself into all kinds of shapes, eager to please, but after a while it became fond of its Ophidian form and from there only made incremental changes.

In some areas it was a reasonable learner - philosophy, language, patterns - but there were things which were instinctive to the children that it would never grasp. The sense of smell was a particularly hard concept, and so it was no use at the main purpose the tribe put the young ones to, the finding of herbs in the forest.

One evening, as it was carefully scraping a hide ready for the tanner to turn it into useful leather, the sage tapped him on the shoulder and beckoned him into the forest. In a hidden clearing, surrounded by the tribe's elders - at a respectful distance, so as not to overhear the ceremony - the sage asked the facet for its true name.

Tourmaline did not give it.

The sage performed a strange ceremony, to the keen interest of the onlookers. When nothing occurred, the sage smiled at the facet and took it aside, out of the ring of elders, off into the trees.

"You are wise beyond your appearance, Tourmaline," said the sage. "I swear upon the Raven I will not harm you, for you have earned a place today as one of his own."

"Then you shall have my true name," said Tourmaline, "when but first you tell me yours."

The sage smiled, and complied, although to this day Tourmaline has no idea whether the sage was lying. But trust must start somewhere, and Tourmaline gave its name.


	10. Chaos

I asked Tourmaline for his thoughts on Chaos, but I got back only this:

"There is no chaos. There is only order that we cannot see yet."


	11. First Impressions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written in response to various requests for first impressions of another character.

_So, *that's* Ansellina?_

He had a person in his head for the label 'Ansellina', but it was now obvious that actually *her* name was something entirely different, and this unimposing figure in a beige corset was the actual Ansellina. He told himself off for judging by appearances, filed away the fact that he was going to have to work out what *her* name actually was, and tried to concentrate on the discussion. This was obviously Kyle's domain - Ansellina was so very *human* about everything - and he was occasionally distracted by trying to work out where the Spine were and what the Comte was doing in the room behind them.

By the end of the meeting, he still hadn't really got a handle on her at all. There was something there, he could tell, something important and deep, but every time he got near it, the scrutiny just skittered off the surface. It was something to do with the Lover, and the little wooden models she showed him later. Something that was very human, or maybe just very Breather. Something he would never understand.

It was like, at the core of her, there was a hole in his world. Something he couldn't quite look straight at.

Now he understood what it was like to have a wound - the kind that was never quite healed and hurt when you poked it, but you couldn't stop poking it, just in case this was the time it would have stopped...

* * *

He still doesn't understand the kindness of others. The little one had taken a liking to him, and suddenly a Marmeluk was escorting him around. In between, there had been some introductions he had missed, as usual. She had been sitting there, in their tent, although he would not actually notice her until later.

\----

Another one, he thought at the builder's meeting, seeing the Amun-Sa wemic take a seat on the bench. Another one over from the Old World, at the peak of their studies there, disappointed here by the long learning process to come before they could claim such heights again. But they never settle down and build walls, do they?

\----

It didn't really sink in until he was talking to the little facet, helping her make her choice of faith, what strength Ishtar must have in hers. He sought her out, afterwards, at Sha T'iel's party (a confusing affair - the food was pleasent and the music was beautiful but the conversation was meaningless and the people made no sense), but he had nothing really to say and the crowd was such that it was hard to just sit and observe.

Still, when she turned up for the Weaver supplication, he looked at her with new appreciation, although he didn't think she noticed.

* * *

Tourmaline didn't quite know what to expect from Varas, who had apparently organised this meeting. It was hard to get an impression of him whilst he was running around being in charge of an event; he seemed happy with the unknown facet having shown up and claimed allegience to a deity of his pantheon, but Tourmaline couldn't tell if his dismissiveness meant anything or was merely due to the urgent nature of all the other tasks required of him as an organiser. Later he concluded that there just wasn't much there to understand - that all of Varas was on the surface, and that he would never cease to be busy with it until he was dead.

* * *

Tourmaline was thoroughly fed up of people wearing bandannas. There was no reason to hide your forehead in public like that, especially if you were actually hiding nothing under it. If you were going to hide a soul symbol or a soul gem, he thought, you should at least have the decency to hide it under a wig or a hat or something which might have a purpose other than irritating Tourmaline. (The flashbacks he'd experienced after seeing the Doctor and his Children had left him in a rather irrational mood, and he really could not concieve at that moment of any other reason to wear a bandanna other than to specifically piss him off.)

Then some random human came to bother him, while he was trying to think and talk to other facets at the same time, and even worse they were wearing a bandanna. Mindful of the need to make friends and influence people, Tourmaline attempted to be helpful, but his mind was elsewhere, and his slightly caustic comment about bandannas appeared to offend the newcomer, who left shortly thereafter. As far as he thought about the incident at all, he came to the conclusion that the thing had probably been an undead, if it hadn't been just an easily offended human.

* * *

It had been Auriel who had first described the Comte to him - "Does a fantastic job of looking like a useless aristocrat. Worth keeping an eye on." But it was Riddle that he was following when he actually got to observe the man in detail. Mostly he was amazed at how little attention was paid to his quiet presence, tailgating the eidolon confidently past the guards, sitting cross-legged and listening to the Comte's plans for the succession. There were many terms he did not know the meaning of yet, but he was learning.

Looking back on the incident, mostly he is left with a profound sense of disappointment. He would have expected at least a knowing look as the pair of them had left, some acknowledgement that he had in fact been being scrutinised all along, but it seemed that he was as invisible to the Comte as to the other humans of his type, which did not suggest a promising future for the man. Since then he had heard many rumours of the man, and perhaps he was growing wiser under the tutelage he'd apparently been receiving, but given that meeting Tourmaline thought it equally likely that he was being taken for a ride. A pity - he'd been quite likable, really.

* * *

Kamakuran. Often in the bar, or out walking briskly from one place to another. Not in any of the circles I know. Bakhana? Yes, I saw her sparring with the Bakhana once, laughing with them in their tent, when they were camped with open sides and practicing on the field by the market and the enclosed ritual site. Bakhana, then.


	12. Invasion of the Bodysnatchers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Noncanon - written in response to a challenge prompt about body-swapping.

He woke to a nightmare of darkness and fire, of strange rhythms and panicked helplessness.

_Think fast, think fast._

Where were the controls on this thing? So many things moving, surging, rushing, a cacophany of signals, most of them *internal*, irrelevant. Just one lever, a little push - but everything was hidden under layers of strange feedback and clumsy tightness. It couldn't be that hard, they did it every day, many times a day.

_Pull back. Let the instincts stay in control._

He could feel that there was disorder - that things were not as they should be, however complex and suboptimal their standard state - and realised that his fear, to some extent, was driving this thing, driving the madness that surrounded him. Pulling back, he could feel the ancient machinery taking over, regulating the breathing, regulating the pulse, keeping any number of half-remembered concepts he'd heard Fiona mutter about stable and together.

When things were calmer, cautiously and slowly, he began to explore again, sorting the inputs into internal and external. The creature - he - was lying down, good, on a soft surface, even better. Some of the redness was not imagined - light was shining on its - his - eyes.

He twitched his fingers first - figuring that would be the least disruptive motion - feeling the feedback and the shape of the controls. Gradually he stretched muscles around his body, exploring, careful not to make any large motions which might call attention to himself while he was still in this partially disconnected state. He devoted some attention to hearing, filtering the noises from within away from his attention, discovering that it was actually quite good at that. There were people talking nearby, but he couldn't quite make out the words, and outdoor sounds, the bustle of a gathering.

Finally, when he thought his control was reasonably established, he opened his eyes. And just as quickly closed them again, his arm already half up - another instinct - to shield his eyes, and a small cry which he hadn't intended escaping his lips anyway.

"Oh, you're up, Banner?" said a voice he almost recognised - one of the Independant Alchemists, maybe. "How was the dreamroot this time?"

"Interesting," he managed to choke out, collapsing back to a prone position. It was hard to do more than one thing at once, and there were so many things which needed little slices of his attention. He wondered how they got anything done like this.

Well, it looked like he was going to have to find out.


	13. In The Most Traditional Manner

As he looked down on the fire, he remembered the hive.

He was crouched low, folded up, pressed together with the drones and the slaves. It was many months after the captures. Even the scaled ones crouched like they were born to it. Those who would not or could not were no longer with the hive. No longer in the world. Already the ranks of the scaled ones were thin, their weakest and most obstinate members taken for sacrifice. The Azarch were a steady people, and took no more than they required, but a dead snake was less use in a rite than a live one, and a rebellious slave was no use left alive.

Below him, in the centre of the vast amphitheatre, the ranks of warriors surrounded the pit of sacrifice itself. Keeper of Sacrifice stood in the centre of the circle, a respectful distance held between him and his colleagues, and on the stone slab before him lay Laughing River. She had been weak since the birth of her child - who was being kept by the Azarch until they achieved their moment of insight, but would probably be sacrificed soon after - and was no use for any of the duties to which she could be assigned, not even strong enough to feed and raise her own child. She would die soon in any case, so they were here to dedicate her soul to the Basilisk in the most traditional manner.

Around her hung from metal stands the burning lanterns which provided the same flickering illumination as was now shining on the entirely, shockingly different scene which had prompted this memory to rise unbidden. The contrast was amazing, was vast, was almost sickening. The figures by the fire, for as much as two of them were myrmidons, could hardly be more different in their bearing and purpose to the silent, respectful warriors surrounding Keeper of Sacrifice.

His internal viewpoint flickered between the two events, and on to later ceremonies where he stood in the pit beside the Keeper and entreated the Basilisk himself, a potential sacrifice as much as the luckless inhabitant of the slab, but somehow each time escaping the deity's wrath. As much as he hated to admit it, as much as he would prefer to lie to himself about the matter, he could not avoid the conclusion he had come to. For all its misery, for all the suffering he had experienced there, for all the brutality of slavery and the impersonality of their twisted religion, there was a part of himself that still inhabited those chist-walled passages. There was a certainty there, a pattern to life, that he felt the absence of more keenly than ever, here in this strange party of sworn and mortal enemies pretending to be friends.

As much as he hated himself for it, he missed the hive.


	14. Fragments, Just Fragments

It was not for any particular ability, Tourmaline surmised, that it had been chosen as a priest of the Raven. In fact, quite the opposite, it suspected. The tribe would not suffer unduly if Tourmaline was lost to them for their impertinence. Compared to any of the Ophidians, it was a cripple, the kind of burden on the tribe that would have been quietly buried long ago if it was not for its lack of need. It could not shoot straight with a bow; it could not find the vital herbs and medicines the tribe relied heavily upon; it could barely throw a spear, much less in any particular direction. It could perform menial tasks in a tolerable manner, patching tents and making clothing, and now it could mediate between them and their god.

That was always how it felt, even though it was devout in its prayers and understood the Serpent's appeal. It had entered into an arrangement with the Serpent, certainly, one which marked its soul and brought it status in the tribe, one which it did not regret. Yet it knew that it would never truly be one of the tribe, never feel the scales it wore, never take a mate and raise its own young here. The concerns of the tribe were different to its concerns. It took on those concerns as far as it could. It was happy to contribute to the tribe's endeavours, overjoyed when the hunting was good and the weather was mild, when the tribe was led to bounteous lands and pleasant ground. But when the tribe starved it did not starve. When the tribe were cold it could thicken its skin against it. When the ground was hard and stony it had no need to lie upon it. The concerns of the tribe were different to its concerns.

As it tended the fire it saw them. The cities burning. The people dying. The facets advancing calmly in lines. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. Magic would taste different, then. The sage who had rescued it had been learning to channel. He said they would return to the place Tourmaline had been found, would investigate the place of its birth. It contemplated the flows of magic, from time to time, when it had a moment to itself, but there was nothing, or maybe just an echo, an echo of an echo of a whispered command. It could not channel. The flows were plentiful enough to sustain it, but not to create something outside of itself.

Magic would taste different, then. It would throb with the minds of the connected ones. Tourmaline listened to the ancient tales, but they were fragments, just fragments, and twisted by time and by design, bringing the word of Raven in the place of the facts of history.

This place was not Tourmaline's place. They searched the forest but they could not find the place of its birth. It had wandered far before it had been caught. This place was not Tourmaline's place, but what other place did this world have for it? It would dwell here, for a time.


	15. Tourmaline doesn't believe in ghosts, except for the kind that are real

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Challenge response: If a ghost from the past visited your character, who would it be and what would it say?

"Done well for yourself, haven't you?"

Tourmaline turned suddenly from his sitting position, knives out and in his hands, to find that the voice belonged to exactly who he thought it had.

"You're dead," he said, as if pointing out, calmly and gently, something obvious which the person in front of him really ought to have known. His eyes darted to the figure's forehead, but it was clear of concealing adornment or mark of immortality. Not that that means anything, he reminded himself sternly.

"And you're not," replied his old mentor expansively, turning around to take in the view. "Not with those bugs still, either."

"I don't know who you are," said Tourmaline, with a warning tone, "or how you got in here, so I wouldn't expect much in the way of a welcome." Then he smiled wryly, his thoughts catching up to his response to a potential threat. "I'm giving you about half odds of being Huwa, a quarter of being some variety of Fallen. You might even be Riddl, but I don't think he goes in for that kind of thing."

"You wound me," said the ophidian, clutching his chest in a mockery of being wounded by an arrow. "And here I was, just stopping by to congratulate you."

"The person you are imitating is dead," repeated Tourmaline, "and, I note, in such a manner that makes it quite unlikely that they would still be walking around in any form, let alone showing up to congratulate me. I must admit, I'm interested about how much you appear to know about my past, but everything other than the precise skin you are wearing you could have sourced fairly trivially, I suppose."

"Maybe I can read your mind," said the ghost. "But no, it's just me. I suppose you could say that the Serpent sent me." Noting Tourmaline's posture - the tightening of the grip on the knives, the narrowing of the eyes - the ghost threw up its hands and took a step back. "Whoa, there, no need to be so twitchy. The Serpent sent me to congratulate you, kid. He likes what you're doing here. It's a bit inconvenient in places, sure, but you've still got the style. And if you ever want to come back in to the winning tribe, he'll be happy to take you back, no hard feelings, you know? No, kid, don't worry, no pressure. You've done good. Enjoy yourself."

Tourmaline relaxed a little. It appeared that this strange creature was in fact just an eidolon of the Serpent. He made a mental note of the fact that it appeared to have had no trouble manifesting in his consecrated shrine to the Weaver, although he supposed that it would not have been much trouble for it to simply manifest outside and sneak in while his mind was elsewhere. Even the one it was imitating was reasonably silent in motion, and there was no saying what improvements it could have made to that.

"Was there anything else?" he asked brightly, satisfied at having explained the mystery, as the creature finished its sales pitch.

"Not if you didn't want to chat," said the creature. "Didn't want to intrude. Just felt like stopping by, that's all."

"Have a nice being dead, then," replied Tourmaline with a note of sarcasm, tucking the knives away and returning to sit in front of the centerpiece of the shrine, trying to reassemble his thought processes. He glanced back once, but the eidolon had returned to the Maelstrom.


	16. Tell Me That I Can Come Home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Non-canon - challenge response to 'how would your character make a final stand?'

He had still been uncertain when he made it to the mana site, slithering through the enemy lines in the form of a low-slung crawler. He had wasted some of the precious time he had bought with his abandonment of his people (surely they were on a ship by now, sailing across the ocean? surely they would make it through the closing gap in time?) by building a rampart, a fortification around a non-existent army, while he prayed.

It was not so much simple prayer as a long, solitary supplication. _Weaver, do not make me do this thing. Weaver, tell me this is wrong, tell me this is not my path, tell me that I can come home._

He did not know if it was getting through. Sometimes he could barely hear his mind above the drums of war, playing even out here beyond the lines of the battle. He had not allowed himself much of a mind while he was crossing the worst of it, or even now he would be standing with the legions of the damned, fighting those who he had come to call allies, those who he had come to call friends.

But there came a time when he could not delay any longer. The blessing that he had been given was burning in his soul, crying out to be used.

Grimly, despairingly, Tourmaline began to build an army.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Challenge involved identifying a soundtrack - I had trouble deciding between 'whole scene takes place in total silence' and 'some kind of vaguely tribal drumbeat, starting very quiet and building up to involve chanting and whooping by the end'.


	17. Win Condition

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Non-canon. Challenge response: 'what is your character's win condition?'

He looked out over the crystal city, laid out in perfect harmony with the flows of magic that coursed through the world like a cleansing stream.

No, that wasn't right.

*It* looked out over the crystal city. It was comfortable with such a reference now. Comfortable in its own self-manufactured skin, its own racial identity.

Eyes open or closed, it made no difference. The minds of the people sang to it. Some of the buildings were of wood and stone, it was true, and some of the people were flesh and blood, or wood and sap, or light grey stone. Without variety, there could be no perfection.

It would not be fair to call this an ending. All things were not discovered. A myriad combinations of life and laughter spread dazzlingly before it, a near-endless stream of permutations. Maybe they were endless. It was too soon to tell.

What it did know, however, with the perfect clarity of many lifetime's study and the deep intuition that had engendered, is that the greatest threats were past, the greatest battles over. With inhuman coordination and precision, they had made it so. They had cut around the world, snipped it out of the reality which it had faced, found by painstaking research the pathological cases of change and the dead ends that the world was prone to - and destroyed them utterly.

And quietly, without anyone suspecting it was not quite precisely one of those necessary changes, one of the prunings that would make life's tree of possibilities bloom and grow indefinitely and forever, it had eliminated all traces of that deity which had once caused it such pain.

It was a good time to be alive. Praises be to the Weaver.


	18. Myrmidons With Names

As he walked through the bustling streets of Abu Malikari, inside his own mind Tourmaline was somewhere else entirely. Beside a fire, at a small hunting lodge.

He did not know what they saw in him. It was strange that they were so open. He tries to recall the myrmidons. They are both more and less uniform than the ones he had practice in telling apart. Their names repeat in his mind. _Xochiotyl. Ixtli? Axceti?_ Myrmidions with names. Not the names of another culture, either. Their own names.

I do not need to breathe. I have nothing to fear from animals. Only the sentient can truly harm me. The things they describe are meaningless. Yet there is a meaning for them, like the meaning that Ansellina has, like the meaning that Raoul draws, in blue and smiling for me.

* * *

In the depths of the forest, covered in snow, he rages.

_If only I did not fear death..._

No. He does not fear death. It is the ruin of all that he has worked for that he fears.

However far he runs, he cannot escape the serpent. Not so much the god in all its trappings as an entity in its own right, but the one that they put in his heart, when they were making him, when he was young. The one he was taught when he was first taught anything at all.

He remembers the look in her eyes. You betrayed me, it says. You betrayed me. He wants to bluster, to prevaricate, to say the right words in the right places, and maybe he had already. Maybe everything was going to be all right. Maybe everything was proceeding as he'd planned.

_Too slow. They go from strength to strength._

Moodily, he looks for something to kick. He kicks a log. It doesn't move.

_How am I meant to save the world? I don't understand people. I haven't the strength to be evil. I haven't the will to power..._


	19. A City Aflame

As he gazed up at the forms of his attackers, chanting and hacking at the remains of his body, he thought sluggishly about reassembling himself a little, maybe saying something, maybe shouting in hope of rescue, not that any would be in earshot if they couldn't see.

He thought about sending some last message to the Weaver, but the best he could think of was 'This is all very ironic.', and he didn't think that would help.

Anyhow, it didn't matter any more.

He could hear the drums.

\----

Somewhere in the depths of the Maelstrom, on a war-torn plain, a facet is camped with an army. There is a city aflame before them, which they are besieging.

Sitting beside the fire, knives at his belt and a spear across his knees, he is telling those gathered here (who are mostly myrmidons) a tale. It is a strange tale, and not one that belongs in these lands. It is a tale of the outer darkness, and of a place without fighting, not just for the moment but for all time, a peaceful land where each person reaches their full potential.

They do not believe that this is possible without the war to strengthen them, and once again they throw the facet in the fire. Yet there are new faces, not the blank chitin with which the facet has had so little success, and perhaps one or two go away with a new thought in their hearts that before they had not been able to entertain.

It is not much harsher than the world, really.

And there is something eternally amusing about transfixing a surprised wasp with a freshly grown spear.


	20. If I Ever Lose My Faith In You

There are other heavens, and worse hells, than this.

Tourmaline gives thanks every day that he was not sent to Coyote. He cannot concieve of a heaven of the Shark, and hence it is unlikely he would have done so well there. The things he knows of that god are all things which rely on reaction, rely on something other and imperfect upsetting the balance so that redress must be made. The initial vision he has of the Shark's heaven is a great grey expanse of water, or less than that, for water has a surface to divide it from the sky. But he recalls a firelit conversation on the essential robustness of variety, and so instead he imagines a great profusion of things, moving and acting in a cycle of life and death, a pointless and tedious clockwork of carnage and carnality. Each thing is interlinked with perfect harmony, eating and being eaten, giving birth and dying, flowering and fading. Sometimes there is even change, but it is change without progress, change without meaning, for everything is in balance, now and forever.

He would have done quite well, he imagines, in the heaven of the Basilisk. It is not because he is an innately disordered creature that he turned to the Weaver. Hierarchies do not bother him, so long as one can climb them. Even in the perfect hierarchy, locked in place for all eternity, there is a quiet satisfaction in doing one's assigned tasks with competence and trust in those who assigned them and those who are further assigned to support one's labours. Basilisk has never seemed to be an enemy of progress, not in itself, stripped of all the corruptions that those in a place too high for them call traditions. He has a purely personal hatred of the deity, of course, but it fades in importance with each passing day, and in the courts of Basilisk it would no doubt have faded faster. He suspects, deep in his heart, that Basilisk would also settle on the perfect world, given time and the correct people out of which to form it, and he would have been happy to be a part of that if it had come to that.

The Jaguar... life within the Jaguar, he suspects, would not have been much different, in essence, to his existance here. He imagined a dense jungle, deep and green and liana-strewn, filled with a profusion of brilliant and colourful life, dancing and singing and living out loud. It did disturb him slightly that his body in this imagined place was stubbornly made out of flesh, the better for people and creatures of all natures, laughing in the joy of the hunt, to chase him gleefully through the undergrowth and rend him colourfully apart. There were souls of every race and every origin in the heaven of Jaguar, much more than in the heaven of Ant, but his work was no more effective here as they were well pleased with their immediate pleasures and often in states of consciousness too altered for meaningful communication. There were tranquil groves of draping blue flowers, like wind-chimes gently tinkling, in which he found his own joy, much as he found satisfaction here in war. Not much different, in essence.

The domain of the Serpant makes him shudder to think of it. Like the world as here was like the world, he imagined, yet everyone said one thing and meant another, twisted and turned in their words and their allegiences. When he was with a troop here, he could trust the myrmidons to have his back, even if around the campfire they would hiss and tell him to be silent. There was camaraderie of a sort in the lands of the Raven, perhaps, but never an easy certainty of trust. When he spoke to people here, they rejected his words with a refreshing directness, or displayed real interest they were too weary to be feigning. How much false hope would he have gone through, in the land of that which had ensnared so many of his brethren, which remade itself from moment to moment to its own best advantage? It was a good thing for a child to learn these lessons, but if he had been there he knew that he would soon be worshipping the thing again, believing himself to have remained true.

He looks across the ranks of myrmidons beside and before him. _If I ever lose my faith in you,_ he said to the place within himself which once had known the hand of the Weaver upon his life, _that is what I will become._

There are worse hells, and more miserable fates, than this.


	21. Soul Visualiser

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Non-canon: "The Amici Institute of Science unveils their greatest invention yet: A device that allows a creature to visualise, with perfect clarity, their own soul. What happens when your character undergoes self-analysis?"

Tourmaline has always known what his soul looks like, and as he peers through the mounted pair of goggles on the strange device, they reveal no surprises. The whorls of the blue oval coalesce into many pictures. There are the buildings that he knows how to evoke, and those that lay yet undiscovered. There is his understanding of the manner in which his body is built, and how that understanding can be used to put other things together. There is a little side-channel in which a short, grainy video of an avian waking up with a human's arm and being helped off the operating table plays over and over.

There is Anna, forever frozen in time the way that he knew her briefly before she fell to a native idol, and the mark of the Weaver upon his soul, Raoul's picture, Riddl, Ansellina fanning herself, Amilie preaching. Brent, Canashir, Detail. The Marshalls like a family portrait. The Rukhi and their hospitality. The little blue tent and its shrine. An earring. Laughter and music and dancing. Raoul and Tami, thanking him. Equals-Sign, talking to an ophidian, reassuring Fergal.

The rest of his soul is buried under a layer of jungle and long grass and confusion, a layer of animal instincts and nimble escapes.

The myrmidon's image is in greyscale. The colours have faded from the whorls. This is the part of his soul that the Basilisk touched, the part that comes back to him with fire and with drums and with meat that looks like what was killed to produce it. Mining, at the rockface with the other slaves. Crouching in obeisance in the amphitheater surrounding the pit of sacrifice. Standing, right next to the one who performed the deed itself, exhorting the Basilisk to honour their dedication and bless the hive with good hunting. The researchers. The experiments that they performed.

Gradually, at deeper levels, the colours seep back in - not just the blues and the purples, but all of the colours the world has to offer, gleaming shyly from the opal base of his soul. There is a faint overlay of the snake, the seer, the one who rescued him, but what he sees first are the myrmidons beating him down, his rainbow form shattering against the hard ground. Only then can he see the rest of the tribe, the final desperate chase through the forest, not sure whether they were attacking or retreating. The campfire, the tents, running with the young braves, learning to shoot a bow, fumbling, not having the eyesight to pick out the prey as it ran, not having the nose to scent the plants to be gathered. This part of his soul belonged to Serpent, it always had and always would, the days of learning with their triumphs and their frustrations against the backdrop of the tribe.

At the back of his soul was just a sliver which didn't belong to anybody, but it was back before reason and understanding, where everything was a new sensation and a confusion of senses rendered all the images meaningless, incomprehensible.

Tourmaline looked up from the goggles to see the Marshalls hovering anxiously. "It's kind of interesting," he admitted. "I don't know how you'd see it, though."


	22. Mirror

In this house there is a mirror, hung haphazardly on the half-collapsed wall, and the facet gives it a glance in case it provides a tactically advantageous view down a line of sight not otherwise covered.

He - it - he - has changed since he came here, changed and grown, changed and adapted. The frills are gone and the sharp crystalline edges gleam in the reflected light of the fires raging throughout the city. It's a variation of his mining form, but harder and sharper.

The colour is a vanity he has not quite let go of yet, despite it being disadvantageous in the mostly ochre ruins in which they are fighting at the moment. It's as good as ever in the dark, but not much use for misdirection in the day.

Watching his sightlines, it appears to be all clear for the moment - no, wait... a glint of chitin catches his eye in one of the rock piles behind him, reflected clear as sunlight in the mirror. 

His eyes narrow as he calculates, prepares, and in one fluid motion brings up his spear and flows smoothly across the intervening space to transfix the surprised myrmidon lurking in the half-darkness. 

It is instinctively, viscerally satisfying to slice it apart as it twitches and dies.


	23. Memoriam

He turned the tooth over in his hand, admiring the fastening in the dim light that came from the building and the candles. She was talking with Constance, and with Boris. Full of life. Larger than life.

Once, I feared you, he thought. Now... now I see you playing with fire. And I don't know. I don't know why I should care. But I don't want you to get burnt.

Palm upwards, tooth centered upon it, he offers the lost item to the wemic in the moonlight. He does not want to call attention to it. He just wants, in that moment, to be useful. To serve her, even in such a little way.

She does not notice. Perhaps, he realises afterwards, her blindness meant she could not see the gesture at all. Perhaps she was too engrossed in the conversation to notice the facet's subtle movements, almost invisible against the darkness.

He strings the tooth onto his dagger, next to the pencil and dance-book from Ansellina's wedding. The ribbon for the pencil makes a sturdy base for the wire that wraps the tooth. He fusses with it, tugs at it, entwines the silver wire and the green ribbon so that they may not part.

He puts it down in his list of Things I Have Done That Someone Might Want To Kill Me For.


End file.
